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unlike the random saguaro, scrub and cholla he’d learned to maneuver about.
    Shannon pulled up and stepped out of the car, left the motor running. Last couple of beers dangled in their plastic web from his hand.
    “Here’s your chance, kid. Show me what you have.”
    So he did.
    Afterwards they went for Mexican food to a place on Sepulveda the size of a train boxcar where everyone, waitress, busboy, cook, seemed to be family. They all knew him, and Shannon spoke to them in what Driver later discovered was perfect idiomatic Spanish. He and Shannon had a couple of scotches to start, chips and salsa, a blistering caldo, green enchiladas. By the end of the meal, several Pacificos having passed by on parade, Driver was fairly wiped.
    That morning he woke up on Shannon’s couch, where he lived for the next four months. Two days later he had his first job, a fairly standard chase scene in a low-end cop show. Script had him hitting a corner, taking it on two wheels, coming back down—simple, straightforward stuff. But just as he pulled into the turn Driver saw what could be done here. Swinging in closer to the wall, he dropped those airborne wheels onto the wall. Looked like he’d left the ground and was driving horizontally.
    “Holy shit!” the second-unit director was heard to say. “For God’s sake print that—now!”
    A reputation was being born.
    Standing in the shadow of one of the trailers, Shannon smiled. That’s my boy. He was working a top-grade movie four stages over, swung by on a break to see how the kid was doing.
    The kid was doing all right. The kid was still doing all right ten months later when, on a perfectly routine call, a stunt the like of which he’d done a hundred times, Shannon’s car went over the edge of the canyon he was speeding along and, cameras rolling, catching the whole thing, plunged a hundred yards straight down, somersaulted twice, and sat rocking on its back like a beetle.

Chapter Nine
    “I’m gonna run across and grab something to eat,” Blanche said. “I saw a Pizza Hut over there and I’m starved. Sausage and extra cheese okay?”
    “Sure,” he said, standing near the door, by one of those picture windows on aluminum tracks that all motels seem to have. The lower left corner had sprung out of the frame and he could feel warm air from outside pouring in. They were in a second-floor room facing front, with only the balcony, stairway and twenty yards or so of parking lot between them and the interstate. The motel itself had three separate exits. One ramp onto the interstate was off the intersection beyond the parking lot. Another was just up the street.
    First thing you do, room, bar, restaurant, town or crib, is check and memorize the ways out.
    Earlier, road weary, bodies vibrating from far too many hours in the car, they’d watched a movie on TV, a caper film set in Mexico with an actor who’d been big for about three days before sinking into drugs, guest-star gigs in films like this one shot on the cheap, and the meager, trailing fame of tabloid headlines.
    Driver marveled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie. Couple of chase scenes, Driver’d be willing to swear it was Shannon driving. Never saw him, of course. But definitely his style.
    Has to be Blanche, Driver thought, standing by the window. No other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.
    She’d taken a brush out of her purse and started into the bathroom.
    He heard her say “What—”
    Then the dull boom of the shotgun.
    Driver went in around Blanche’s body, saw the man in the window, then slipped in blood and slammed into the shower stall, shattering the glass door and ripping his arm open. The man still struggled to free himself. But now he was lifting the gun again and swinging it towards Driver, who, without thinking, picked up a piece of the jagged glass and threw. It hit the